Friday 26 March 2010 07.00 EDT
First published on Friday 26 March 2010 07.00 EDT

When the Independent launched in 1986, the three founders, all of them ex-Telegraph journalists, were convinced they had discovered the formula for keeping a paper free from the influence of a Rupert Murdoch, a Lord Rothermere, a Tiny Rowland, a Robert Maxwell or a Conrad Black. Like a bank or a widget company, the newspaper would issue shares – many of which would be held by its own journalists – and these would be publicly traded on the stock exchange. Safeguards would prevent the emergence of a single dominant shareholder, and the sole motivation for owning shares would be to make money, not to wield power or make propaganda. As long as the paper's finances were sound and ownership dispersed, its independence was guaranteed.

What remains of that independence now the Independent and its Sunday sister is sold to Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB spy, for a pound? In the financial sense, the Independents are now utterly dependent. Yet miraculously, the journalistic culture created by the founders survives, at least in part. The Independent has lost much of its original high-mindedness: its journalists no longer refuse freebies, it embraces celebrity and glamour as much as any other paper, often more so. Yet no other paper regularly publishes such a wide range of opinion, ranging from Dominic Lawson and Bruce Anderson on the right, through Hamish McRae and Adrian Hamilton around the centre, to Steve Richards on the centre-left, Johann Hari and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on the quite-a-bit-more-left and Mark Steel on the very-left-indeed.

These qualities have survived ownership by the Mirror Group (now Trinity Mirror), which at the time was headed by David Montgomery, an Ulster Protestant, and by Tony O'Reilly, an Irish Catholic. Neither Montgomery nor O'Reilly, for all their faults, had a political agenda. Does Lebedev? The London Evening Standard, under his ownership, is a blandly and predictably conservative (mostly small "c") paper, with less flair and panache than under its previous Rothermere ownership. But you'd expect that from what has become a freesheet.

Some commentators suggest the Independent, too, may become a giveaway under Lebedev. Strategically, it may seem a smart move at the very moment when Murdoch's Times and Sunday Times have announced they will charge for website content from June. Don't let Murdoch fleece you, Lebedev could say; we'll give you better information for nothing. But the distribution problems are quite unlike those of a local paper such as the Standard and it is hard to see how advertising revenues, still struggling to recover from the recession, can compensate for lost sales income. Moreover, the Independent, throughout its history, has marketed itself as a premium product which has content worth more than Murdoch's trash. It would seem oddly perverse to allow Murdoch to seize that high ground.

The biggest danger is that, as an outsider regarded with some suspicion in English society, Lebedev will be over-anxious to establish his respectability and, therefore, discourage the kind of hard-hitting, sometimes outrageous, journalism that a small-circulation paper needs. If the Independent loses its edge – and its culture of journalistic independence – it may as well be given away free.